Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt: The Complete Collection Online

Authors

Multiple authors

Publisher

Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, MA, 2017–)

Entry by
Susan Anderson,
completed November 01, 2017:

Adriaen van Ostade sketched the core elements of this sheet in preparation for his 1673 watercolor Tric Trac Players under an Arbor, in the Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, Paris.1 Van Ostade’s hand may be seen in the black chalk sketch throughout the composition and the central figural grouping in roughly applied pen and brown ink, including the figures under the arched doorway. As Bernhard Schnackenburg recognized, careful inspection reveals that a second layer of lighter brown ink and wash was applied by Van Ostade’s last student, Cornelis Dusart. Dusart’s finer pen line can be seen in the arbor, the tree, the remaining architectural elements, and the figures at the left in the background. Dusart may have known Van Ostade’s watercolor, but his free interpretations of the background details here are guided more by Van Ostade’s black chalk sketch: in contrast with the watercolor, Dusart filled more of the sky with the tree, rendered more detail in the cottage, and added livelier background figures, one with an outstretched arm and another with a pointed hat and bending torso.2

Dusart presumably inherited a large cache of Van Ostade’s compositional studies, together with the rest of his studio contents, upon his master’s death in 1685. A small number of Van Ostade’s compositional studies without additional campaigns survive, and these invariably follow his practice, seen here, of quickly rendering an overall sketch in black chalk and working out a central figural grouping rapidly in brown ink.3 More often than not, though, another hand filled in background detail to transform the drawing from rough study into finished object, as Dusart did in this sheet. In some instances, the intervening hand remains unidentified, suggesting that such revisions were likely an exercise done under either Van Ostade’s or Dusart’s supervision.4 Dusart’s high degree of detail, finish, and nearly seamless transition from Van Ostade’s original lines make this sheet stand out among this group.

2 In addition to Schnackenburg, others have commented on the two hands at play in this drawing. See, for example, William Robinson, Seventeenth-Century Dutch Drawings: A Selection from the Maida and George Abrams Collection (Lynn, Mass.: H. O. Zimman, 1991), cat. 85. Following Schnackenburg’s lead, Robinson described the architectural elements differing from Van Ostade’s watercolor as Van Ostade’s hand, but they are instead part of Dusart’s later campaign.

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